A three-time NAACP Image Award winner who also holds the Langston Hughes Medal for Outstanding Poetry and the first-ever Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award, Nikki Giovanni has established herself as a poet who can entertain and challenge, inform and inspire. She presents Bicycles as a companion collection to her 1997 Love Poems. In that book she expressed notions of love—romantic, bold, and erotic—in delightfully unexpected ways. But in the years that followed Giovanni suffered the deaths of her mother and sister, as well as the shootings on the Virginia Tech campus, where she teaches. Though her life seemed to be spinning out of control, Giovanni also found a new love, and here distills romantic love in all its manifestations.

"For four decades, poet, activist, and teacher Giovanni has been a polestar. Playful and profound, cutting-edge yet always looking back to the wisdom of those who walked before us, Giovanni, recipient of the first Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award, defines life's demands and rewards for seekers of all ages. Hers was the clarion, healing voice that rose from the horrors of the Virginia Tech shootings in 2006, and her Hip Hop Speaks to Children became that rare phenomenon, a best-selling poetry book. Now Giovanni graces readers with a new collection of love poems, titled, with her usual élan and wit, Bicycles 'because love requires trust and balance.' Disarming, sly, sensual, and knowing, Giovanni's poems scan like the teasing and wise songs favored by Dinah Washington and Etta James. Homey and worldly, funny and jazzy, these nimble love lyrics move from the routine—cooking, housework, football, a howling heart, bodily woes—to the miraculous, because Giovanni is a trickster and a sage who folds a lifetime of feelings and discoveries into each poised, swinging, and heartfelt line."—Booklist